VMware Bets on PaaS to Change K8s Game in 2022

VMware is betting that the shift toward building microservices-based applications deployed on Kubernetes will accelerate in 2022 as higher levels of abstraction become more widely available and make the platform more accessible.

Craig McLuckie, vice president of research and development for VMware, says at the core of the company’s strategy for enabling IT organizations to achieve that goal is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment based on VMware Tanzu that will make Kubernetes more accessible to developers.

Currently available in beta, the Tanzu Application Platform is a PaaS that provides developers with a framework for building applications that can be deployed on clusters running any Kubernetes distribution. That PaaS environment, for example, will also make it simpler for developers that are already familiar with the Spring Boot framework for building Java applications available on Kubernetes.

At the same time, VMware is betting that curated instances of Kubernetes, like VMware Tanzu, that are either deployed by an internal IT team or consumed as a managed service will drive a wave of cluster management consolidation and break down management silos. IT teams will look to lower the total cost of managing Kubernetes by taking advantage of the economics of scope that is enabled by higher levels of abstraction that are deployed on top of Kubernetes, he says.

In some cases, Kubernetes will be deployed on either a bare metal server or on a virtual machine. In either case, VMware will enable its Tanzu distribution of Kubernetes to be deployed on either platform. In addition, VMware also provides access to a Kubernetes distribution that has been tightly integrated with its VMware vSphere hypervisor.

McLuckie says it’s apparent that a tectonic shift is underway with regard to the way applications are constructed. However, as is the case with any major transition in the enterprise, that shift will take time. Most organizations will be running monolithic applications alongside emerging microservices-based applications for years to come.

Newly independent after spinning out of Dell Technologies, VMware has shifted away from its view of Kubernetes as an existential threat to the existence of virtual machines. However, most Kubernetes clusters thus far have been deployed on top of virtual machines to ensure isolation between application workloads. The number of instances of Kubernetes running on bare metal servers is expected to steadily increase, but for now the bulk of Kubernetes clusters running in cloud computing environments will continue to run on top of a virtual machine. VMware has been making a case for employing its hypervisor as the foundation for a hybrid cloud capable of running both monolithic and microservices-based applications.

There are, of course, plenty of other options when it comes to hybrid cloud computing. The biggest advantage VMware has is that its hypervisor is already widely used in on-premises IT environments. Deploying that same hypervisor across multiple clouds makes it simpler for IT teams that have standardized on VMware vSphere to extend the reach of the management framework they already have into cloud computing environments.

It’s too early to say how the battle for control over hybrid cloud computing environments will play out in 2022. However, with the arrival of VMware’s PaaS for Kubernetes, competition is about to heat up.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

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